It all became a reality when I right-clicked on my solution to add a new project. I thought I had made a mistake. How couldn’t I add a simple setup project after writing all that code? After a minute or two of intense (!) research, I received my answer:

“Visual Studio setup projects (vdproj) will not ship with future versions of VS.”

Like the rest of the world, my heart was broken. It took me countless hours to figure out how to use the broken setup project technology, what was I going to do now? [1]

I overheard Pratik and Chris talking about the WiX installer as an alternative to deploy a product. All I thought was, how hard could it be? Shouldn’t be a problem. Thanks to Pratik and an entire work day, I found that the learning curve for WiX is quite steep even though it is more powerful than what the setup projects offer. Only when you figure out how to use it. The same can definitely be said about InstallShield, you can ask Pratik.

Today when my job sheet said ‘compile when these changes are made’, it got me slightly worried because I haven’t worked with WiX or InstallShield before. I wasn’t ready for a day of studying how to deploy the project I have been working on for a week for one client. With the tiniest bit of hope, I googled how to setup project in Visual Studio. It was one of those Hail Mary moments with no hope until I saw this gem:

In April 2014, Microsoft caved and released a free official extension to Visual Studio 2013 that allows you to create installer projects. It is exactly the same as the installer project types in VS 2010[2] except for some minor bug fixes. All you have to do is download the extension from the abovementioned link or simply search “Microsoft Visual Studio Installer Projects” on the internet[3]. When your VS restarts (you have to close and reopen it) you will have setup wizard and project types just like you could before.